Inside the Walls: Architects Design

Friedman Benda presents its annual guest-curated exhibition “Inside the Walls: Architects Design”, a survey of seminal architect-designed furniture curated by Mark McDonald. With representations spanning over a century, the exhibition will present a broad range of pivotal architects from the US, Latin America, Europe, and Asia—such as Luis Barragán, Lina Bo Bardi, Marcel Breuer, Charles and Ray Eames, Frank Gehry, Philip Johnson, Oscar Niemeyer, Charlotte Perriand, Warren Platner, Gio Ponti, Ettore Sottsass, Kenzō Tange, and Mies van der Rohe—with a focus on three groundbreaking figures—Gerrit Thomas Rietveld, Rudolph Schindler, and Frank Lloyd Wright, whose global reach continues today.

Drawing on archival photographs of interiors and historical ephemera, this exhibition charts revolutionary developments in architecture and design across the 20th century. Testaments to the innovative use of new technologies born out of post-war scarcity, works such as Charles and Ray Eames’s Storage Unit (ESU) 400 (1950) and Charlotte Perriand’s Bibliotheque ‘Maison du mexique’ (1953) epitomize the ingenious use of materials like the lighter weight Fiberglas, Masonite, bent plywood and tubular steel. 

This presentation will be a unique opportunity to analyze the relationship between architectural aesthetic and design ethos on a smaller, more intimate scale and investigate various approaches to reconciling interior and exterior spaces, the commercial versus the residential and the private versus the public sphere.

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